HP today announced the volume availability of its Intel Itanium 2-based workstations running t Windows XP 64-Bit Edition Version 2003. Both machines are designed for various applications that require a lot of computing power, such as mechanical computer-aided design and analysis (MCAD/CAE), scientific research, oil and gas, imagery analysis and software development.

HP Workstations zx2000 and zx6000 support up to one and two Itanium 2 CPUs respectively. Both come equipped with either 900MHz or 1.0GHz Itanium 2 chips, UATA and/or SCSI hard-drives, spare PCI slots, I/O functionality found in most today’s PCs and so on in minimal configurations. The zx2000 comes with a single 900MHz Itanium 2 with 1.5MB of cache and costs between $3298 and $5832. The zx6000 comes with one or two processors, either the 900MHz model or a 1GHz Itanium 2 with 3MB of cache, and has a price range of $6905 to $15135.

Systems are available for orders on HP’s web-site immediately, but will ship in mid-May, according to sources.